Tania the Revolutionary
a short novel by Michael Pritchett
“Judy and her family live with us today and will, if the reader allows, comfort us with insight. I remember Judy’s world well and needed to revisit it, faced, as we all are now, with events that cluster around these times.” - Bob Stewart for The Writer’s Place
“The novel is short, intense and immersive. We are always inside Judy's head, always in the grip of her perceptions and the ways in which her life has been forever changed by what happened to her.” - Margot Livesey
“Pritchett’s narrative tilts time frames, tricks perception. Where exactly are Judy and her mother standing? How long between scenes, which switch quickly from home, to garden, to school, to the car where Judy sits for hours within sight of the boarded-up house of her bondage? Judy seems not to recognize how long between this place and that thing; how could we?”
Tania the Revolutionary
A Midwestern girl, escaped from a cult and finding it hard to come home, gets unexpected help from newspaper articles saved in her mom's basement about the cult experience of a girl from one of America's oldest and wealthiest families, rescued in a police shoot-out after five years on the run with an urban militia.
a short story featured in Solstice Literary Magazine
The Witch
The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis
While writing a biography of his famous namesake, Bill Lewis, a high-school history teacher, nearly loses himself in his attempts to understand one of the great untold stories in American history the adventures and subsequent suicide of Meriwether Lewis. Even as he struggles to illuminate that strange and exuberant time and falls under the spell of the elusively seductive persona of Capt. Lewis, Bill finds himself fighting his own personal crisis, brought on by a clinical depression that threatens not only his book, but his job, his family, his 13-year marriage, and his own survival past the age of 40.
The Venus Tree
Set in Midwestern states, these 10 stories by the winner of the 1988 Iowa Short Fiction Award offer perspectives on lives that encounter and surmount life's obstacles. In these tales, many of them imbued with the ambiance of this country's heartland, the strivings of ordinary people are viewed in an empathetic, if sometimes enigmatic, dimension.